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It depends on how you are interacting with the database I believe. I'm no expert, but I had to work with this issue for a while since I use asian scripts on my site.

Make sure that in phpMyAdmin that you have the right collation and settings for the database before you begin. utf8 / utf8_general_ci or whatever they are is what I used.

But you also need to be sure that you are interacting with the database using utf8 so that they match up. For example, if you interact using PHP and mysql_query, then by default it uses latin encodings I believe.

If PHP, connect to the database...

$connection = mysql_connect(...)

and after connected

PHP Code:

mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'", $connection)
or die("Could not set character set to utf-8");

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'", $connection)
or die("Could not set names to utf-8");

Now, any queries done via PHP will be done with the utf8 encoding, and the database is storing as utf8 as well. With the result, everything should work out alright and you should also be able to read the characters in the database through phpMyAdmin